Nolan credited his support of the GOP-backed measure to the Obama administration’s series of delays for several provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including business compliance deadlines and minimum coverage requirements. The delays have fueled one of Republicans’ most common knocks against the law: that Obama is giving special treatment to some affected parties but not others, primarily individuals who must gain insurance coverage before the end of the month or pay a tax penalty.

“The tax on the individual mandate, either buy health insurance or you pay the tax, frankly, it’s not fair,” Speaker John Boehner said on Wednesday. “And the president’s outlined and protected big businesses from problems with Obamacare and mandates in Obamacare. It’s time to provide the same kind of relief for American families.”

On Thursday, Nolan had adopted the line as his own, saying it’s a matter of “fundamental fairness” to ease Obamacare’s impact on taxpayers if businesses are spared.

“I sat there and I debated it with myself, and I finally said, you know what? If we’re going to give business an extension, we can give working men and women an extension,” he said.

Republicans call it political cover

Obamacare’s shaky rollout and lagging enrollment have forced some of the law’s supporters — especially those in potentially vulnerable districts — into a bit of a precarious position. While defending Obamacare and making the case for its long-term success, they often find themselves siding with Republicans in criticizing the law, and even voting against it, until it stabilizes and operates as planned.

Republicans say these Democrats are getting jittery, faced with defending an unpopular law in an election year. President Obama’s approval ratings have fallen since the rollout (though they’ve bounced back from their low-point in early December), an inauspicious sign for congressional Democrats on the ballot this fall. A Star Tribune poll last month found him especially unpopular in rural Minnesota, represented in all corners by Democrats.

After last Wednesday’s vote, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a conservative super PAC, said Nolan had an “election year conversion” against the law, saying he “must be terrified by the health care law for it to send an ardent Obamacare champion like him running for political cover.”

Nolan said that’s not the case. He still supports the law — and the mandate, its centerpiece — but that he’s looking for ways to fix it and make it fairer. In practice, that means he’s willing to support GOP bills that most other Democrats dismiss as quixotic attempts to dismantle the law.

“I’m very supportive of the Affordable Care Act, but I’m mindful of the fact that there are some ways we can fix this thing as it rolls out,” he said. “I still support the individual mandate. This doesn’t do away with it, it just delays it along with the delays in the requirements for business.”

Conservative groups spend against Nolan

Nolan has been critical of the performance of the insurance overhaul since last fall, when he called on Obama to fire the people behind healthcare.gov’s disastrous early technical failures. While he voted against a nearly identical mandate delay in July, he supported a bill in November (along with Reps. Collin Peterson and Tim Walz) to delay the law’s minimum coverage requirements, a vote minority leader Nancy Pelosi would later call “political” for the Democratic defectors.

Twenty-seven Democrats voted for Wednesday’s individual mandate delay bill, five more than who voted the bill past summer (Peterson voted for both bills, and occasionally sides with Republicans on Obamacare votes). But Nolan dismissed the idea that the vote was meant to provide some political cover — for him or his colleagues — heading into the fall campaign. He said Democrats haven’t shifted their position on the law itself, just that they’ve recognized the need to clean up some of the damage done by its first few rough months.

“Most of us are taking the position that we’re very supportive of the act, but we’re not unmindful of the fact that we’re going to need to make some changes and adjustments,” he said.

Nolan said he hasn’t heard complaints from constituents about the law. If he starts to — with the mandate about to take affect and election year posturing already underway — he’s ready to defend it, but only as a means to the end he’s really looking for: a single-payer system.

“I’ve always been supportive of single-payer, nothing is more fundamentally American than that,” he said. “That’s my ultimate goal. The Affordable Care Act is good in all the various things it does, but it’s no end all.”

Republicans are already attacking Nolan for supporting the law. Americans For Prosperity spent $225,000 on an Obamacare ad against him in December, and former Sen. Norm Coleman’s American Action Network launched a $50,000 buy in Duluth last week.

But Nolan said there’s no point in voting for Republican bills like the mandate delay as a way to defuse those attacks — they’ll keep coming either way. He said he’ll try fixing the law where he can now, and hope for the best in the long run.

“There’s the old saying, success is a combination of vision and execution, and I think the vision on this is good,” he said. “The execution has been terrible, so we have to make some adjustments to accommodate the difficult circumstances people have been put in.”

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry

Comments (5)

Rep. Nolan did the right thing, he voted to create parity, in one small regard, between the people and the business community. It is a good vote in my opinion.

In general, “tweaking” the ACA should come as no surprise; in the year following its passage, I heard over and over that changes would occur. So now that it is happening and some people act surprised, mostly the repub’s. As usually, it is all theatre…the repub’s offer no solutions…yawn…

The only aspect of the ACA that irks me is the so-called “public option” was dropped by Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid. These folks cowered to the insurance companies, who in case you haven’t noticed, are continuing to loot the masses…offering less and charging more.

Bean counters make most health decisions nowadays, not licensed physicians. That’s my experience. It will get worse until there is a “public option”, that is my prediction.

I’m sorry to disagree with you, Richard, but in my opinion a public option is a non-starter. The reason being is it keeps the current system largely intact without creating a large enough pool to bring down the average premium. It would be best to insure the entire population under one plan that covers basic service and get the biggest bang for your negotiating buck. If people want a higher level of service, that’s where the private insurance companies can step in and make a little green. They won’t be the big conglomerates we see today, but I’m perfectly fine with that.

The next iteration of health care after ACA has to be full-on universal single payer or we’re just kicking the can down the road.

Why are the extensions coincident with the re-election cycles? Wouldn’t deadline extensions represent items requiring repair directly tied to legislation within the current term of the sponsor of that legislation? I thought there was an urgency to help the uninsured, the canceled, and the run-away expense? Not so important anymore? Show some accountability and responsibility to fix it by leading the effort to rework the law in a bipartisan way with actual identification of problems and solutions and honest cost projections and the taxes that will be added month by month as this monstrosity hits the retail market. So far where has the GOP been wrong about any of this? Where is the evidence that any of this will ever work, much less a single-payer system where a foreign national can arrive by plane and check themselves into a hospital at effectively no cost as well as any person belatedly insured? And every detail of our lives is now under legally sanctioned scrutiny if it can be linked to forcing us to be “healthier” to “reduce” healthcare costs. Additionally, the IRS, can debit as it pleases from your checking account, now the bill collectors to guaranteed premiums of insurance companies that will continue making greater profits. Try to work that refund out. What I can’t understand is why doesn’t anyone in the Democratic arena see that healthcare insurance is not the central issue in healthcare. It is service providers and the technology applied that determine real costs and reduces costs and offers the greatest return on investment. Why not prove the Obamacare idea by expanding the VA Hospital system and opening its services to the public testing, every concept of the ACA. If it is a better way, either everyone will join the VA or competition will change accordingly to match the higher quality and lower costs that everyone is so sure will result with these new ridiculous “better” government plans and their obscene deductibles and loopholes. We should have committed a billion dollars to an X Prize instead to provide the highest healthcare for the lowest costs under a new provider model that could serve us a thousand times better than the Democrats nodding in their wisdom professing the extensions have nothing at all to do with their re-elections.

The Republicans are now up to 50 hopeless votes to repeal the ACA. Any credibility your comment might have had was lost when you suggested bipartisan fixes to the law. Seriously, just stop.

While you are at it, you might try to actually try to understand the ACA instead of regurgitating Fox News false talking points. If you want to see where it might work, just look to Canada or France or any number of western countries that have lower healthcare costs and similar or better health outcomes. Again, though, the key is actually looking at those systems, and not the right-wing media distortions.

FOX News, Tea Party, Republican, thank you for the alienation. The health system of Japan is better than either Canada or France, but that isn’t the ACA either. Single Payer as the professed next step after the ACA would be very different than these systems after the ACA has done its damage. Insurance companies, not hospitals, or physicians, or customers are determining costs for “minimum coverage” under the excuse that it is less expensive if everyone bought the same policy irrespective of personal circumstances. A solution that perfectly fits into the corporate lobbyist funding model that makes our system of re-electing compromised people hum along for corporate profits unlimited. But that isn’t the least expensive way or the most effective way to provide care for people. The solution begins with non-profit insurers, hospitals and drug company divisions. That is why this could all begin with an expanded VA Hospital system designed to cover the problem of the uninsured and those seeking more affordable options, if it even would be once they tried it. We need to build up community healthcare where early diagnosis with modern technology could reduce the damage of diseases going undiagnosed reducing costs for specialists and expensive tests. We need to focus on driving more graduates into the health field. What does Lasik cost? If Medicare controlled it too, it would still be in the thousands per eye or $59 as they decreed it, testing physicians to refuse medicare altogether. But, since the Democrats did ACA, it is better than anything else anyone could think of and only needs to be accepted as is with a couple of fixes and extensions all after re-election campaigns.